The present invention relates to telecommunications systems and particularly to "800" telecommunications networks.
The number of customer contacts that a business experiences may directly affect that business's market share and revenues. As a result, a business may look to different methods to facilitate customer contacts, such as utilizing currently available telecommunication services. For example, some businesses subscribe to an "800" telecommunication network service in order to provide accessibility to their customers and thus increase the number of their customer contacts. An "800" service allows businesses to offer "toll-free" communications to customers. For example, a customer can dial an "800" telephone number, at no-charge, to contact a particular business in order to inquire about a specific product, place an order, or even request a service, all from the convenience of his or her residence or office.
Typically a business which subscribes to an "800" service is characterized as engaging in a form of "in-bound telemarketing", i.e., when contact with a business representative, or agent, is initiated by a customer dialing the "800" telephone number. In-bound telemarketing services are usually engineered by a business in order to provide an acceptable grade of service for the incoming "800" customer telephone calls. For example, a business will order a specific type of incoming telecommunication facility which is comprised of a number of trunks (e.g. ground start trunks, loop start trunks, ISDN trunks etc.) from the service provider based on their expected incoming telephone call volumes. In addition, a business will determine the number of agents needed to answer, or provide "call receipt", for the incoming telephone calls. As long as the number of agents is equal to the number of trunks, every incoming telephone call can be answered, but when the number of agents is less than the number of trunks, customers may have to wait for their telephone calls to be answered. As a result, in order to make the customer' s wait more bearable some businesses improve their call receipt operation by utilizing sophisticated premise equipment. For example, a large business may actually terminate the telecommunication facilities from the service provider in their own on-premise switching system, or Private Branch Exchange (PBX), which provides the business with additional features for handling incoming calls. With such an installation, an incoming telephone call can still be answered if all agents are busy, but the calling customer may first hear an announcement to "Please hold, all agents are busy . . . " to encourage the customer to wait for service.
However, even if a business engineers its in-bound telemarketing service to provide for generally efficient call-receipt of incoming customer telephone calls, there is still a problem during "peak periods", such as during either sale promotions or holiday weekends. During these peak periods, the number of incoming customer telephone calls may not only exceed the number of call-receipt agents available to answer a call, but may also physically exceed the capacity of the incoming telecommunication facilities subscribed to by the business. Disadvantageously, these additional customer calls are lost. Customers calling in only hear a busy signal and since their call is "not answered" i.e. "blocked" from completion, they must redial the telephone number to attempt contact with the business. While customers are not charged for such calls, re-dialing can be a frustrating experience and, as a result, not all customers will redial. Since a business can only identify the customers who actually make contact with the business, the customers who give up, whose identities are unknown, represent lost customer contacts which affects sales of services or products. Even if a business has on-premise equipment, such as a PBX, this equipment, once all the incoming facilities are busy, cannot detect if additional calls are being blocked from completion, so, from the business's point of view these additional customers are, again, lost.